Slip into my thoughts and do watch your step

Tag Archives: Failures

Last night brought about one of those heart rendering moments that everyone who uses a computer falls into now and again. Let’s go through this, shall we?

Did my write and rewrite on my latest scene. I know I chucked out maybe fifty, sixty words, which is a nice chunk when you only managed about four hundred. Then I started into writing, and I swear, this was one of the first times where I got into writing things out of sequence. I knew I had to say things, but I was really jumping ahead of myself getting it said. Managed to get out just over a thousand words, however, so in the end it was a good time had by all. More or less. I’m sure others will tell you differently.

I saved the story, then I went to save the story again. I keep everything I write backed up on external drives: the only thing I have on my laptop is the current work in progress. I hook up the drive, start the copy–

And I begin getting file errors. In particular, it told me one file was “in use”. That’s never a good sign, because if nothing is running and you’re being told something is being used, that usually means it can’t be used.

Being in data processing as long as I have, the first thing you do is look for the “root cause”. At the moment this meant, “Am I having an issue with the version on my laptop, or is the problem with the one saved on my external drive?” The nice thing is, Scrivener stores every scene as a separate file within your project, so when you get a message saying a certain file is bad, a few clicks on the Explorer will tell you right away which scene is giving you fits.

Found it, then brought up both versions of the story to double-check. The problem was with my saved version. This is not good, because you don’t want your saved version to crap out on you, right? On the other hand, if you original version is okay, that’s a plus, because you get rid of the bad version and just go from there.

I renamed the project on my external drive and copied over my work in progress. I couldn’t delete the old project because of the corrupted file, but as it was already eleven-thirty PM, I was ready for bed.

Up before the alarm went off, I fired up the laptop and then copied over my work in progress to my other external drive, aka my failover drive. Yes, I keep things back up on two separate systems, and I’m thinking of adding a third just for the hell of it. The copy went well, so now I have things backed up and protected.

At the moment I’m running a disk-fix program to see if the file I have is bad, or if there are sectors on my external drive that need fixing. If the drive is okay, I just need to delete the corrupted files, and there are ways you can slug that sucker out of there.

“Yes, who’s a good little system? You are! Just get my disk fixed, ‘kay?”

The moral of the story: have backups, and have a plan to fix and repair for when things start to go sideways. These days you can pick up terabyte driver for under one hundred dollars, and it doesn’t make sense not to have a couple of disks worth of your stories safe and sound.

What Has Gone Before

Check the Past by Date

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with you. Perhaps speak isn’t the correct way to put things, but it works for me. In a way, I am speaking to you: I’m dictating this with Dragon software. It seems in the past couple of days Dragon has learned my idiosyncrasies far better than before, and […]